Director Stavros C. Stavrides'
film ‘Century Man : The Father Nicholas Salamis Story', celebrates
the quiet fortitude of a Greek born priest who witnesses almost a
century of Greek immigration in Canada. At 103 years of age, Father
Salamis has brought comfort to over four generations of Greeks in
Canada.

Born on the Greek Island
of Samos in 1897, tragedy struck Salamis' family five years later
when his father died, leaving the family destitute. His mother raised
her two sons by renting a mule to local businesses for transport.

Nicholas Salamis' mother
was determined to educate her sons. She enrolled both her boys in
the highschool on the other side of the island where Nicholas received
his training in commerce. Seventeen-years-old and armed with his certificate,
Nicholas first emigrated to America, then settled in the Greek community
of Montréal in 1919.

Post-war Montréal's Greek
community had a population of 2,000 and 500 businesses. It was not
long before Nicholas Salamis was the bookkeeper for the community.
Despite this community and prospects for success, Nicholas felt something
lacking in his life. At age 35, Salamis returned to Athens to study
theology. He had decided to become an Orthodox Priest. In 1938 he
became Father Nicholas Salamis and spent the first seven years of
his priesthood in a parish in Toronto. In 1945 he was transferred
back to his beloved Montréal.

The church is vital to
the Greek community - a link to the past and the glue that binds the
various factions of a people who are often divided by politics. Father
Salamis arrived in Montréal just before a great change took place
in the Greek community. Towards the end of the 1940s, over one hundred
thousand Greeks emigrated to Canada. They were largely uneducated,
unskilled, with little or no knowledge of either official language
of Canada.

They were coming to Canada
to escape the horrors that had plagued their country for the better
part of the century - war, oppression and economic collapse. Father
Salamis not only administered to their spiritual needs with baptisms,
marriages and funerals, he also eased the frictions which developed
between the established Greek Community and the new immigrants, who
were referred to with disdain, as ‘displaced persons'.

Father Salamis became the
rock of the community over the next forty years, watching over his
flock from the time they arrived as desperate new immigrants, scared
and clinging to the safety of their community. He shepherded the children
of these immigrants as they became members of the greater Canadian
society, learning the official languages, getting the education that
their parents so desperately wished for them.

Today, Father Salamis is
103 years old. He has long since retired from the priesthood, but
he still watches with interest over his Greek community in Montréal,
as they add so richly to the tapestry we call Canada.